Banned from Google??

It’s the largest, most widely used search engine out there, you know it well, as it’s basically everywhere. Google. At this point in time, the holy grail for businesses either already existing online, or thinking of it, there is an incredible laundry list of items, to do, not to do, and in between all the white and black exists the grey.

I’m going to talk, just very briefly, about some of the black, or the methods which will (most likely) end up with your site BANNED FROM GOOGLE!

Redirecting to another domain:Redirecting to another domain is not a 100% guarantee that you’ll be banned from search engines. But it is a very common spammer trick used in conjunction with doorway pages and cloaking. If you set up a redirect that goes to a new domain, you need to write it as a 301 redirect. This tells Googlebot that the redirect is permanent, and they should change the listing to the new domain.

Invisible or Single Pixel Images:Invisible images are images that are 1×1 pixels in size and cannot be seen by the naked eye on a Web page. This is similar to hiding text or displaying different content to search engines than to your customers. And don’t assume that search engines can’t read CSS or HTML tags that resize full-sized images. If you do this to optimize your pages, your site will be banned.

Hidden or Invisible Text:Hiding text by making it the same color as the background color may fool your customers, but it won’t fool search engines. Another variation of this is where you make the font size so small that it’s unreadable by the naked eye. Text that is hidden from your readers but visible to search engines is considered spam and will get your site banned.

Cloaking:It can be very tempting to use cloaking, but while it might give you better results at first, search engines don’t like it. Search engines want to provide a resource of information that is real, not something that has been doctored to give artificial results. This is often called cloaking because it is an effort to hide, or cloak what your site delivers in something that might be seen as more palatable to search engines.

These are some of the basic black hat SEO techniques out there, all are easily noticed even by a person browsing the net, now that you know what to look for. Ideally of course, these factors are paramount to keeping in mind when choosing your SEO expert.